Alternative health is an exploding market, as more and more people discover its benefits and turn away from the crude, illogical methods of mainstream medicine. Williamstown and the surrounding South Jersey areas are welcoming a wide range of alternative medicine practices and businesses. This influx of holistic awareness can be seen everywhere, from massage therapists to acupuncturists, to life coaches and more.
Here’s your guide to the amazing holistic practices in your area.
What is Local Alternative Medicine?
Though a wide range of practices exist under the umbrella of Alternative Medicine, the general consensus is that it refers to any healing therapy or technique that utilizes natural and non-artificial methods, substances, and actions to perform the necessary job. Consequently, holistic health and alternative medicine practitioners aim to treat the body as a whole, looking for the root causes of issues and encouraging the body to heal itself rather than merely subduing symptoms.
The idea behind alternative medicine is that perfect and balanced health can be had by anyone, and that the way to achieve this is through finding balance in one’s own life – physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
The main principles of holistic health include:
- Human beings possess innate healing powers, or the physical and mental ability to heal naturally.
- Treating the root causes of illnesses, not just the single disease or one symptom.
- Treatment seeks to heal the emotional and mental blockages that may have allowed the body to get impaired in the first place.
Holistic practitioners include medical doctors, natureopathy, herbalists, massage therapists, chiropractors, and homeopathic doctors.
From energy healing to chiropractic, holistic health practices emphasize treatment over medication as the best approach to treating a patient.
Holistic and Alternative Therapies Treat Your Mental and Physical Well-Being Equally
Reiki Healing
Reiki is a the practice of using bodily (subatomic) energy to heal the mind and body and create harmony for the patient. Reiki was an unknown practice in many parts of the world until 1970. That was the year that a talented Reiki Master from Japan moved to California with hopes of spreading knowledge about this ancient healing practice.
Reiki is an holistic healing technique that relies on the transfer of energy through a person’s hands. You can perform Reiki on yourself, or you can utilize the skills of someone who practices Reiki, often referred to as a Reiki Master. You can find clinics and practices throughout the tri-state area.
The goal of Reiki to clear your body of negative energy by utilizing twelve energy points located throughout the body. By hovering your hands over these specific points, positive energy flows through the body while negative energy transfers out of our body.
Acupuncture
Acupuncture is a form of alternative medicine that consists of stimulating specific energy points throughout the body using a variety of methods such as the application of touch, pressure, magnetic crystals, metal wands, or by penetrating the skin with tiny needles.
A traditional Chinese medicine technique, acupuncture can treat a wide range of physical and mental ailments. This technique works by one of two ways: either the practitioner uses his or her own bodily energy to balance that of the patient’s, or an object that is magnetically charged is used to correct subatomic energy flow by correcting the electromagnetic field. For reference, all living organisms have an electromagnetic field. Though weak, it is a least dense part of our physical body’s and it’s health is directly related to the state of our subatomic bodily structure.
If your energy is out of balance, you cannot possibly be completely healthy. Acupuncture seeks to correct these imbalances by using ancient sciences that held an understanding of our body’s that modern science has long forgotten. Despite its apparently bizarre details, acupuncture has become extremely popular in the West, because it has an amazing track record. Indeed, acupuncture can be used to cure a number of bodily maladies, and has well over a 75% success rate. For some ailments, such as back pain and nerve damage, it has nearly a 100% success rate.
Homeopathy
The idea behind homeopathy comes from two ancient Greek words, homios (meaning similar) and pathos (meaning suffering).
Homeopathic remedies involve taking minute amounts of natural substances to encourage the body’s own defenses against specific problems and imbalances. The specific mechanisms of homeopathy work on both a subatomic and macro level, making them difficult to understand for people on the outside looking in.
The best way to understand homeopathy is to have a grasp of how the world around us is formed. Because everything around us is connected on a subatomic level, everything exists as a part of a collective whole. In this wisdom comes the understanding that many things in nature are reflections and parts of what rests inside us. Keep in mind, the same atoms that make up the dirt, rocks, trees, bones, and oceans of the Earth also make up our bodies.
Indeed, all that exists outside us is also within us. As such, elements that are found in certain plants and minerals find their counterpart within us. So on a physical level, homeopathy seeks to reunite certain elements and compounds from nature with those that exist inside us, to stimulate a response that creates balance.
There are more complex systems at work of course, including our own minds. Much of homeopathy relies on our minds making a subconscious connection, thereby utilizing a minute portion of a certain substance and using it to great effectiveness on a subatomic level that sometimes defies physical expectation. Because of this, homeopathy is sometimes looked down upon as a form of pseudo-science or quackery, when it is anything of the sort. This alternative healing practice has existed for millennia, because it works.
The goal of homeopathy is to ultimately balance the body so that it can fend off disease before it even manifests, but it can be used to heal certain illnesses after the fact.
Other Holistic Health Practices in Williamstown
Holistic healing is a continually expanding field, as more science and understanding arises. Here are some other kinds of treatments and therapies offered in South Jersey and the surrounding areas that fall under this umbrella:
- Meditation
- Chakra therapy
- Reflexology
- Kinesiology
- Crystal therapy
- Hypnotherapy
- Aromatherapy
The founder of Digital Sages, Matt has an extensive background in self-mastery and has authored several books on the subject. His goal is to demystify important esoteric subjects and help people transform their lives through self-awareness and personal empowerment.